The South certainly did not lose for any lack of idealism, or dedication to its cause or beliefs, or bravery and skill on the battlefield. In time these things would tell on the battlefield, certainly on the broader level. The North was able to bring its industry and its manpower to bear in such a way that eventually, through sheer numerical and material advantage, it gained and maintained the upper hand. Even while it was happening, men like Union officer Joshua Chamberlain—who did all that he could to defeat the Confederacy—could not help but admire the dedication of those soldiers.
One main reason why the South lost and this may seem offbeat because it flies in the face of the common wisdom is that the South lacked the moral center that the North had in this conflict. The North had a fairly simple message that was binding it together, and that message was that the Union, the idea of Union, was important, and probably after you could add the crusade against slavery to that.
And what you increasingly find as the war continued is that the dialogue got more and more confused. And you actually had state governors such as Joe Brown in Georgia identifying the needs of Georgia as being paramount and starting to withhold resources from the Confederacy and just protecting the basic infrastructure of the Georgia state government over the Confederacy.
In the North you certainly had dialogue and debate on the war aims, but losing the Union was never really a part of that discussion.
Preserving the Union was always the constant. So, one key reason the South lost is that as time went on and the war got serious, Southerners began losing faith in the cause because it really did not speak to them directly.
Historians have offered several explanations for the Confederate defeat in the Civil War. While Northern superiority in numbers and resources was a necessary condition for Union victory, it is not a sufficient explanation for that victory.
Neither are the internal divisions within the Confederacy sufficient explanation for its defeat, because the North also suffered sharp internal divisions between those who supported a war for the abolition of slavery and those who resisted it, between Republicans and Democrats, between Unionists and Copperheads. And, in fact, the North probably suffered from greater internal disunity than the Confederacy.
Superior leadership is a possible explanation for Union victory. Abraham Lincoln was probably a better war president than Jefferson Davis and certainly offered a better explanation to his own people of what they were fighting for than Davis was able to offer.
And that combination of strategic leadership—both at the political level with Lincoln and the military level with Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan—is what in the end explains Northern victory. Professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and author, coauthor, or editor of eleven books about the war, including the recent Third Day at Gettysburg and Beyond and The Fredericksburg Campaign: Decision on the Rappahannock.
In the end there was a waning of the will to resist on the part of Southern white people, but that was tied directly to the performance of the Confederate armies in the field; more than once they seemed to be on the brink of putting together enough successes to make Northern people behind the lines unwilling to pay the necessary price to subjugate the Confederacy.
The primary reason the Confederates did not have more success on the battlefield is that they developed only one really talented army commander, and that, of course, was Robert E.
There never was a commander in the West who was fully competent to command an army—and I include Joseph E. The almost unbroken string of failures in the West depressed Confederate morale. And that bad news, together with Union advances into the South, the destruction of the Confederate infrastructure, and the problems of the Confederate economy that worked hardships on so many people, all came together to bring about Confederate defeat.
Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, John C. Pemberton, Joseph E. Hardee, and Joseph Wheeler. With Beauregard and Johnston you had two generals who were unwilling to work with their government. With Hood and Bragg you had two generals who were basically incompetent as army commanders.
And with Albert Sidney Johnston you had a general who underwent some kind of confidence crisis after Fort Donelson. Let me point out that every one of those generals was in the West. Any explanation that does not account for the West is irrelevant to your question.
The war was lost by the Confederates in the West and won by the Federals in the West. Did class tensions undermine the war effort? Were women on the home front insufficiently committed to the cause? In fact, only in the final months of conflict did a failure of morale tangibly affect the ability of Confederate armies to resist.
This was a tough society. Enslaved people fled to join the Union army, depriving the South of labour and strengthening the North by more than , soldiers. Even so, slavery was not in itself the cause of defeat. In the end, slavery was destroyed because the North won, rather than the other way around.
But the North had to be prepared to pay the high price of victory. The Confederates certainly understood this. The only way the South could win the war was for the North to give up. And so, from the outset, the driving purpose of the military strategy of the South was to undermine northern morale — not just in its armies, but on the home front. The American Civil War was a good example of a revolutionary war — but one in which the side seeking to seize political power — the Southern Confederacy — failed to use revolutionary methods to its full advantage.
What was the reason for this failure, and why did the Confederacy allow itself to be ground down in a war of attrition in a conflict in which the war aim on the Union side was nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the Confederate armies and the destruction of their warmaking potential?
As nation states existed, according to Hobbes, either to maintain internal order or protect themselves from external aggression, this is the criterion by which to assess the strength of Southern society to resist invasion and the imposition on it of political measures, including ultimately the emancipation of slavery, which it had gone to war to resist.
Indeed it could be suggested that by the Confederacy had no other justification for its existence other than to maintain armed forces in the field.
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